Word: hot-button
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...more conservative voices (like Antonin Scalia and John Roberts) and more liberal ones (like Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg), the next President has the power to appoint a new Justice who will tilt the Court. Perennially debated matters, like abortion rights, could be at stake, along with new hot-button issues such as the rights of prisoners held at Guantánamo. What's less well known is that there are also a number of vital environmental cases facing the Court that could go either way, depending on who wins the Presidency. "There are few areas where the battle...
When the Supreme Court issues rulings on hot-button issues like gun control and the death penalty in the middle of a presidential campaign, Republicans could be excused for thinking they'll have the perfect opportunity to paint their Democratic opponent as an out-of-touch social liberal. But while Barack Obama may be ranked as one of the Senate's most liberal members, his reactions to this week's controversial court decisions showed yet again how he is carefully moving to the center ahead of the fall campaign...
...heating represents nearly twice (roughly 7%) the energy usage that air-conditioning does. By contrast, the Bush Administration has had a policy of malignant neglect, enunciated by Dick Cheney, who once called conservation a "sign of personal virtue" but not a national goal. "After Carter, sacrifice became a hot-button word," Schipper says. "But there's a reasonable position between sacrifice and just being foolish...
...unions, leftist opponents, and even most French pundits say the new rules as conceived by Bertrand's law will allow business to impose their requirements and conditions for overtime on employees, rendering the 35-hour law obsolete even if it remains on the books. But given the topic's hot-button status, some pundits warn Bertrand and the government against trying to have its cake and eat it. The last time someone in tried getting tricky with cake during a tense summer in Paris was Marie-Antoinette - and we know how she ended...
...another paranoid, apoplectic fit about a rising Asian power. Twenty years ago, the bad guy wasn't China but an ascendant Japan, which was out to destroy the U.S. with its unfairly well built sedans, VCRs and microchips. The ballooning trade deficit with Japan was the hot-button political issue of the day, just as the yawning deficit with China is today. Japan was using "unfair" trade practices to disadvantage U.S. industry, many Americans believed. The Japanese were "manipulating" their currency, the yen, to make their exports extra cheap in the U.S. market, in the same way China is accused...